How Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) Work

In 2013, five MOOCs won credit recommendations from the American Council on Education, the same organization that advises colleges on how to deal with high school AP credits. Colleges don't have to accept those MOOCs for credit, but now it's easier for them to do so if they want to. The MOOC platform Coursera is exploring ways to offer in-person, proctored add-ons for students who want to earn verified certificates of completion, similar to the way NC State's ASIC design course handles crediting [source: Young].

The trend toward MOOC legitimacy in higher education raises questions about where that education is headed. Supporters believe the format could usher in an era of affordable, high-quality education for everyone (with Internet access) who wants one, opening doors to college and career advancement for those who can't afford to drop a hundred grand or so on the four-year residential model [source: Masterson, Marques].

Yet most in the higher-education field, including Brinton, agree that the best learning models incorporate significant teacher-student contact, and colleges simply can't provide the number of instructors necessary for that kind of contact in a MOOC class of 100,000 [source: Caplan].

Writing assignments, too, fit poorly into the current model. Despite a controversial edX-developed program that grades essays using AI and horrifies English teachers everywhere, they're only very rarely assigned, so it's unclear how writing ability will fare in a MOOC revolution [sources: Caplan, Marques, Knight].

And then, there is the survival of academia itself: Will universities dump their science departments, and the research that goes with them, in favor of the lower-cost MOOC model, sending students online for intro physics rather than paying to seat thousands of students in lecture halls with live professors? Or maybe schools will drop the zero-cost component of the format in favor of maintaining their physics departments. Coursera already plans for its possible certificate program to be fee-based [source: Young].

Christopher Brinton, for one, is optimistic. "It will take us many more years of trial and improvement before we get MOOCs right. But as substantial as the challenges are, [even greater] are the opportunities MOOCs present to redefine the boundaries of education for the future."

So, we wait and see. In the meantime, you or I or my 3-year-old can take Princeton's Networks Illustrated, Stanford's Artificial Intelligence, and Harvard's Intro Neuroscience because they sound kinda cool.

The Honor System

Can there ever be an effective way to guard against cheating in MOOCs? At the moment, says Chris Brinton, "An in-person testing center is probably the only true and effective method of identity verification that is practiced." That could change, though: Coursera is developing an application for checking students' identities by their typing style [source: Young]. Still, ID verification only takes care of the "who's completing the test," not the "how's this person completing it" [source: Young]. It's unclear how this issue will be addressed if MOOC-earned credits and certificates become commonplace.